To Sell Your Book You Need to Know (and I Mean Really Know)  What that Book of Yours Is All About

So let’s say you write a book. Or you write the first or second draft of a manuscript that’s well on its way towards being a book. You live in the weeds of this book for weeks and months and years. You inhabit it. Even in your sleep. It’s exhilarating work. And it’s a slog. It’s the most creative thing you’ve ever done. And it’s also mind-blowingly difficult. You’re trying to capture a beginning and middle and end of something that you may understand intuitively, but still need to build sentences for. In a sense, you’re trying to hold the whole, entire story in your head at any given moment.

Then, as you begin to turn the corner on the material, you think you may be close to done. Your book’s plot follows a clear arc. The dialogue hums along. The characters (fiction or non-fiction) say authentic, compelling things. Some of them are people you’d even like to date or go on vacation with. And the setting is spot-on. The grit of the different locales is there in all its glory. The pacing seems good too.

What I’m suggesting that you do at this moment, pre-publication, is pause and ask yourself: what’s this book about? Then get out a pen and try to answer the question. This may involve broad brushstrokes at first--a kind of 30,000-foot view. And it may be harder than you thought. But try to move past the broad strokes and get closer to the material and ask more detailed questions: Consequences of the plot? Motivations of characters? What does it all add up to?

Call it a pitch if you want. But it’s a little different than the pitch. You’re not “selling” the book yet to an agent or editor (though they will be very interested in the answers you write down). Instead, you’re finishing the book for yourself. And you need to be very clear with yourself.

It sounds obvious. And you already know, in theory, what your book is about. I mean, you’ve been living inside the book for years. But now that you’re close to the end, has its focus shifted? Have certain characters taken over more than you realized and changed the dynamics? Answering these questions was something I did repeatedly while I wrote drafts of my novel. And my book’s focus changed over time. I lost characters I liked, who I thought might be central. I let go of entire, slow-cooked plotlines.

Then, after my editor bought the book, she challenged me to write the tightest description of it ever. Fifteen words or less. It was like putting together the most complicated jigsaw puzzle, and it took me way, way too long. That’s when I knew I still had work to do on the manuscript. And that’s when I understood that I still didn’t fully know the consequences of the plot lines and character dynamics I’d created. This was one of those personal reckoning moments.

I was holding the strings of the marionettes but I hadn’t fully owned up to my responsibilities. The plot still needed me to tighten it until everyone’s actions were accounted for. The characters needed me to help them stop making a mess of their lives and the lives of the people they loved.

The tight synopsis that I wrote for my editor served almost as a trail marker for me when I went back in to do the subsequent draft. I’d refer to it when I was lost in the weeds again. Then I’d remind myself, oh my novel is about X. And X.

It was then that I got to fully understand the beating heart of the book--its emotional truth. Which was something I hadn’t been able to fully see before. But this insight came only close to the end, when I’d laid enough of the grounding wires and done enough writing to get the intimate view in. Then the more my editor understood my book’s motivations--its obsessions and preoccupations--the more she could be an actual editor. Her work began in earnest, and she helped me shape the book to be the strongest final, final, final draft that I had in me.

Susan Conley is the author of the novel Paris Was the Place, forthcoming from Knopf on August 6th, 2013 and the memoir The Foremost Good Fortune (Knopf 2011). She’s written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post and Maine Magazine. You can follow Susan on Facebook and Twitter and at her website: SusanConley.com.

Photo credit: Sous la Tour Eiffel by Jebulon courtesy Wikimedia Commons.